Two short book picks
A recent X recommendation named 'City Limits' by Megan Kimble and 'Crossings' by Ben Goldfarb as timely reads worth checking. (x.com). (The post surfaced in a wider social thread of diverse reading suggestions across fiction and nature writing today). (x.com)
Two recent nonfiction picks land on the same problem from opposite sides: roads shape where people live and whether wildlife survives. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (wwnorton.com) Megan Kimble’s *City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America’s Highways* was published by Crown on April 2, 2024. Penguin Random House says Kimble reports on how expanding urban highways accelerated inequality and fractured communities. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (thestorygraph.com) Kimble centers Texas, where residents in Houston, Dallas, and Austin are fighting highway expansions that her book says would claim thousands of homes and businesses. Her author site points to one Austin example: families could lose child care if a preschool is demolished for Interstate 35. (megankimble.com) (bookbrowse.com) Ben Goldfarb’s *Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet* was published by W. W. Norton in 2023, with a paperback edition dated September 10, 2024. Norton says the book tracks how roads alter ecosystems, not just through roadkill but by changing animal movement and habitat. (wwnorton.com) (labyrinthbooks.com) Goldfarb’s core statistic is blunt: about 1 million animals are killed by cars each day in the United States alone. His publisher and Google Books both frame that toll as the visible part of a larger road-ecology problem spread across roughly 40 million miles of roads worldwide. (wwnorton.com) (books.google.com) Taken together, the books treat highways as more than transportation projects. *City Limits* follows the human costs of widening roads through neighborhoods, while *Crossings* follows the ecological costs when those same roads cut through migration routes and habitat. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (wwnorton.com) Both books have also drawn sustained attention beyond a single recommendation post. *Crossings* was named a best book of 2023 by the *New York Times*, *The New Yorker*, *Smithsonian*, *Science News*, and *Kirkus*, according to Goldfarb’s site and Norton. (bengoldfarb.com) (wwnorton.com) Review coverage of *City Limits* has stressed its focus on present-day freeway politics, not just midcentury history. The *Journal of the American Planning Association* review says Kimble documents how state transportation departments still shape freeway expansion with limited challenge, and *The Englewood Review of Books* calls the book a deep look at United States highway policy and its costs. (tandfonline.com) (englewoodreview.org) If the pairing feels timely, that is because both books ask the same practical question in different places: what a road is for, and who pays for it. One answers through homes, schools, and city blocks; the other answers through deer, turtles, and severed habitat. (penguinrandomhouse.com) (rare.org)
